The Political Life of Memory: Birsa Munda in Contemporary India

This book examines the representation of Birsa's political life, memory politics and the making of anticolonialism in contemporary Jharkhand. It offers contrasting features of political imaginations deployed in developing memorial landscapes. Framing of Birsa in the heroic narrative through a grand scale of memorialisation, often in the form of the built environment, curates a selective version. This isolates the scope of elaborating his political ideas outside the confines of atypical historical records and their relevance in the contemporary context. The book argues that everyday politics through affective sites such as memorials and statues produce political visions, emotions, and opportunities. It shows how such symbolic sites are often strategically placed and politically motivated to inscribe ideologies. This process outlines how the state and Adivasi use memory as a political tool to lay claims to the past of the Birsa Movement.

Rahul Ranjan is postdoctoral research fellow at the OsloMet University, Norway. Currently he is working on the collaborative project titled 'The Currents and Consequences of Legal Innovations on the Rights of Rivers' funded by the Norwegian Research Council. His interests broadly encompass the fields of political ecology, environmental studies, anti-colonial politics and South Asia studies. He has also edited the volume titled At the Crossroads of Rights which is forthcoming in Spring 2022 with Routledge, London.